DataRobot offers free AI platform to help fight COVID-19

DataRobot is offering its enterprise artificial intelligence platform free of charge to help with the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The enterprise AI company initially offered the platform to United States organisations, and is now offering it to the data science and machine learning community in Australia and New Zealand, in an effort to help with the COVID-19 virus response effort.

In collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), DataRobot's COVID-19 response program provides free access to DataRobot's automated machine learning and Paxata data preparation solutions to those participating in the Kaggle competition sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for COVID-19 related research. T

"We're inspired by the passion of our employees, customers, partners, and the data science community who all have expressed interest in identifying ways to help address this global pandemic," says Phil Gurbacki, DataRobot's senior vice president of product and customer experience.

"We hope that by opening up our software to those investigating this pandemic, we will accelerate the pace of research and mitigate the hardships associated with this virus," he says.

"To better prepare researchers and dramatically reduce their data preparation time, DataRobot has pre-loaded all COVID-19 open research datasets into the data prep environment via DataRobot Paxata Cloud Free. The team has also aggregated 132,000 individual papers into a single dataset to give researchers a jump start," he explains.

Gurbacki says the effort will provide researchers with the tools required to conduct modelling related to COVID-19, providing vital information that federal, state, and local governments can use to budget resources and take preventative measures.

"DataRobot will not only offer its platform free of charge, but it will also provide dedicated data scientist resources via its Community and office hours with its trusted AI Success team," he says.

DataRobot is also contributing to a CDC data science working group around COVID-19, and the company's data scientists are using the DataRobot platform to make ongoing predictions about which U.S. counties expect to see cases reported. The results of the predictions are being shared with government COVID-19 response teams and key members of Congress so they can more proactively address the outbreak.